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Enduring Lessons in Education Politics and Policy from the COVID-19 Pandemic

Wed, September 29, 6:00 to 7:30am PDT (6:00 to 7:30am PDT), TBA

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What did COVID-19 teach us about education politics and policy? This panel brings together four papers to offer a productive summary of critical insights from this dark period in the United States. Conceptually, the papers focus on the development and implications of school responses to the pandemic. Methodologically, the papers investigate these topics with a range of qualitative and quantitative, descriptive and causal approaches.

In the first paper, Jonathan Collins uses a series of survey experiments to demonstrate that 1) racial and partisan identification - not contact with COVID - best explain preferences for reopening, 2) those opposing reopening are less likely to comply with government orders, but 3) people are more willing to comply with orders when directed by city and state executives compared to the federal executive, depending on their partisan affiliation. He concludes that politics - not public health – have driven public support for schools reopening and compliance with government orders to reopen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Similarly, in the second paper presented by Sarah Reckhow, the authors examine local reopening policies within the state of Michigan, finding that partisanship was much more associated with district reopening plans than COVID-19 rates. Michigan Republicans were also far more favorable than were Democrats toward in-person learning. They argue that states' decisions to leave re-opening plans to their districts opened the way for students’ experiences to be shaped by their area's partisanship.

In the third paper, Lesley Lavery and Sara E. Dahill-Brown, expand the discussion beyond reopening to describe the complex ways that teachers’ unions have shaped education during the pandemic. They leverage a series of interviews with local and state union leaders as well as district-level case studies across 12 states to describe how teachers’ unions have fought for safer working environments, data collection and transparency, improvements in virtual instruction, and other member and community interests.

In the final paper presented by Melissa Arnold Lyon, the authors provide insight into how teachers experienced those working conditions during the pandemic. Using surveys of roughly 8,000 teachers across the country, they find that the pandemic and pivot to emergency remote teaching resulted in a number of challenges, including a sudden, large drop in teachers’ sense of success. However, they also show that teachers in districts and schools with strong working conditions were much less likely to experience these declines in sense of success.

Taken together, these papers produce novel contributions to long-term debates about school politics and governance. Results demonstrate how intergovernmental relations and organized interests have shaped the politics of education and school operations in complex and overlapping ways. Further, the authors explain how the traditions of state governance and local control in education have paved the way for partisan responses that may reflect local values but also lead to dramatic variation in teacher and student experiences across the country.

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